Is Egypt Irrelevant?

That's the gist of this essay in TIME:

The Middle East has changed, and Egypt has not. 

Cairo is no longer the region’s cultural heart: Egypt doesn’t produce great art, music or literature. Arab TV audiences are much more likely now to be watching Turkish soap operas, Lebanese music videos and Qatari satellite news channels. Egyptian universities are now laughably bad, and the Gulf states prefer Indian, Pakistani and Filipino labor to Egyptian. Egypt’s media scene is a regional joke. 

After decades of mismanagement by corrupt generals and bureaucrats, Egypt is an economic basket-case. It has few valuable resources to sell the world, and its mostly impoverished people don’t have the money to buy anything from the world, either. Even the Chinese, who aren’t deterred by political instability or violence, aren’t exactly queuing up to invest in Egypt.

It seems to me that the essayist is making this argument because it's easier to wash one's hands of the mess in Egypt than own up to the part that Obama's ego (go back and re-read his now-infamous Cairo speech, for example) and miscalculations have played in it. As the most populous Arab nation, there is no way that Egypt can be sidelined, even if it seems extremely tempting at this stage to do so.